The Chairs

The furniture in our dining room is pretty nice. It's large, heavy, dark-stained wood, a bit ornately wrought in a traditional style. It looks like this:


















I'm especially fond of the chair backs, which have lovely scallop designs.

But the chairs have been giving us problems in other ways.

About two days after I arrived, HB and I sat down to dinner at the dining room table. We heard small "krrathunk" from HB's chair. HB bent over to investigate, and came up with a small piece of chair, about 2" x 2". It took us a day or two to discover where the piece came from. But eventually we realized that the front legs of the chairs were supposed to look like this:

 


Not like this:

A couple of days later, the same thing happened to the chair I usually sit in. We didn't really think it was a big deal. We figured we'd get some wood glue, and reattach the two small pieces to their respective chairs.

Until about 10 days ago. HB pulled out one of the chairs and sat down to put his shoes on. I was still in bed, and I heard a "krrrWHUMP". The next thing I knew, HB was in the bedroom, waving this at me:

It had come from here:

Lately, we've been eating in the kitchen instead of the dining room.